Veto threats foreshadow fall drama

Could Republicans push President Barack Obama to the point where he feels he has to play shutdown politics when the new fiscal year begins Oct. 1?

Monday’s veto threats against the first two bills reported from the House Appropriations Committee hinted strongly that such a fight could be coming. And if the only alternative is to be slowly bled to death by an ever-larger sequester, the White House clearly feels it has to take a stand.

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The immediate targets are budgets for military construction, veterans and the Department of Homeland Security. But the greater goal is to draw a line against the House Republican plan that would impose sequester spending levels but protect defense-related programs by using Obama’s domestic priorities as a bank.

This shift of funds will affect “hundreds of thousands of low-income children losing access to Head Start programs, tens of thousands of children with disabilities losing federal funding for their special education teachers and aides, thousands of federal agents who can’t enforce drug laws,” the White House warned. And while calling on Congress to “complete an appropriate framework for all the appropriations bills,” the administration said its veto threat goes beyond these first two bills and applied equally to “any other legislation that implements the House Republican budget framework.”

The Republican stall on even beginning a House-Senate conference on the budget feeds into this confrontation — and was echoed in the veto message. And as the debt ceiling debate falls back to November, the continuing resolutionsuddenly stands out as a defining moment for the president.

The spending levels set in the CR will shape the landscape for the final battle in the fall. Better to draw the line early with a government shutdown crisis, the argument goes, rather than wait to be pushed up against default like the summer of 2011.

In the past, Obama has been famously feckless about the appropriations process — failing to fight even this past spring for administrative funds to implement his health care reforms. And even now, a White House official told POLITICO that from a purely tactical point of view, the administration knows it is stepping into dangerous territory.

“Politically, Republicans would prefer a fight over spending levels than the debt ceiling,” the official said. “But it’s a matter of necessity for us. We have to do something.”

Indeed, since the first March 1 sequester, Obama has had to operate the government with non-emergency discretionary appropriations of $984 billion — about $63 billion less than he had counted on when signing the Budget Control Act in 2011.

From the Federal Aviation Administration to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, agencies have patched together contingency plans to get through these last months of fiscal 2013. But borrowing from Peter to pay Paul works only so long. The strain on the military is immense. And absent some budget agreement that $984 billion will be whittled down further to $967.5 billion at the end of this year, when a second across-the-board cut could be triggered.